Roric's laughter faded into the sulfur-choked haze of the Scrap-Tangle, but the sour taste of bile lingered in Levan’s throat.
"Levan, don't look at him," Beso hissed, tugging hard on his sleeve. His round face was pale as chalk, grease smudged over his eyebrows. "He’ll cut your ears off and feed them to the furnace dogs. Move. Just walk!"
Levan shoved the rusted-iron bodkin into his forearm wrap, skin burning where the metal met cloth. He wanted to split Roric’s breastplate open at the collar line. He wanted to take the haughty bastard’s fancy chrome-plated gear and unravel the weave until it dropped in shreds onto the grit. But the blue glyphs still drifted like poisoned soot across his retinas:
[Anomaly Detected. Class designation [Stitcher] under review by The Weaver.]
Neither spoke as they ducked through the rusted maw of the South Gate, past the gate guards who spat at their boots, down into the grease-slick belly of the Bastion: the Underspin.
Down here, the fortress city groaned. Thick pneumatic lines thrummed along overhead arches, dripping dark moisture onto corrugated iron roofs. It smelled of fried synth-fat, boiled brassica roots, and wet furnace slag. The survivors here wore no burnished plate like the High Spindle vanguard. They wore stitched scraps, burlap reinforced with pitch, and whatever wire they could pilfer from scrap conduits.
"Anais will have the kettle on," Beso mumbled, trying to steady his voice as they took the iron steps down three levels toward Hab-412. "Maybe she traded those copper gaskets for some dried goat ribs. I can smell 'em. Tell me you smell 'em, Levan."
Levan gave no answer. His stride ate the rusted gangway. The latch to Hab-412 hung crooked.
The strike plate had been sheared clean through, metal curled back like peeled fruit skin.
Levan kicked the door inward. It hit the drywall with a dry crack.
Inside, their home had been butchered.
The small pine table—the one piece of real timber Levan had dragged four miles from an old crater site—was split down the grain. Clay jars of drying herb-salve lay smashed, grey-green mush trodden into the floorboards. Anais’s ledger was missing. Her cot had been torn open, the crude batting strewn across the room like moldy snow.
"Anais!" Beso dropped to his knees, clawing through the cotton scraps. "Anais!"
Levan stood dead center in the room. His fists locked into stone. Every vein in his temples beat a sharp, jagged tempo. "She isn't here."
"No, no, no—she doesn't leave the hatch unbolted! She knows the gutter-claws come out at six-bell!" Beso scrambled toward the cracked washbasin, hands trembling violently. "Did scavengers hit us? Did someone track our scrap haul?"
"Scavengers don't carry precision tools," Levan said. His voice was flat, hollowed out by rage.
He walked over to the splintered frame of the door. Stuck deep into the lintel, right at eye level, was a gleaming splinter of metal pinning a stray filament to the wood.
It wasn't cotton. It wasn't sinew or hemp.
It was a single, flawless, mirror-polished strand of metallic alloy, so sharp it had sliced two inches into the dense ironwood without buckling.
Beso looked up, his chin trembling. When his gaze caught the polished gleam, his mouth went dry. "The Shears..."
"The Silver Shears," Levan growled. "The grand guild. The heroes of the High Spindle."
"Levan... listen to me, we have to run," Beso stammered, backing toward the corridor, his boots sliding in spilled grease. "We pack what's left and we head down to the Sump. We hide in the slurry channels. You don't mess with them. Their guildmaster, Lord Beric... he has an S-rank crest! He eats entire combat cadres for breakfast!"
"Why were they here?" Levan turned on him, eyes blazing. "Why would the premier guild of the Bastion raid a rat-hole in the Underspin and drag away an apprentice apothecary? Speak, Beso!"
Beso flinched, pulling his greasy collar up around his ears. "I told her to stop! I swore to her I’d tell you if she didn't drop it!"
"Drop what?"
"The shards!" Beso shouted, half-sobbing. "The Scourge shards the guild buys from the vanguard! They aren't turning them over to the city smelters for purifier cores. Anais found three manifests from the lower foundry. The Silver Shears are gathering raw, unpurified curses. They're grafting them. Binding Scourge-Beast spite into weapons to bypass the Weaver's gear limits! Curse-forging! She said it was poisoning the water lines in Hab-4, said the kids were coughing up black bile..."
Levan stared at the pinned wire. His fingers twitched toward his forearm wrap.
They had taken her because she had seen the rot beneath their polished crests.
"She went to file a grievance with the High Spindle magistrates this morning," Beso whispered. "She thought the laws still meant something. I told her... I told her gold buys ink, and coin buys silence."
"They took her to their compound," Levan said, not asking, stating it.
"Levan, it’s a fortress! They have automated bolt-throwers, level forty Wardens, and—"
"Shut up."
Levan walked past Beso to the back corner of the room, near the cold venting pipe. Before the Sundering, he had measured bespoke suits for men who hid ledgers and snub-nosed revolvers in false pockets. When he had woken up on Vaskarr with his mind scrambled and his fingers calloused by unfamiliar patterns, he had instinctively built something here.
He knelt by the third wall-stud. It looked like solid corroded steel. He dug his thumbnail into a hairline groove where two plates met, finding the microscopic slack in the tension wire.
*Click.*
A panel slid downward on silent brass tracks, revealing a shallow alcove lined with dry velvet.
Inside lay no gold. No rations.
Only a bundle of black parchment tied with waxed cord, and three spare bone needles.
Levan snapped the cord and flipped open the brittle pages. The handwriting was unmistakable—his own hurried, angular scrawl, but the ink was dated from months before he had even met Anais, during the first weeks after the sky tore open.
*Entry 14: The Weaver's interface calls this class non-combatant. A farce. The system measures output, not structure. If reality here is a fabric of active variables, any thread can be pulled.*
*Entry 22: Tested the awl on a minor rot-beetle curse. It failed to disperse into the ambient air as expected. The needle took the resonance. The crimson tone deepened.*
Levan turned to the final, frantic page, the ink slashed across the paper as if written while running.
*Warning to myself: The red needle does not destroy curses. It absorbs them. It contains their frequency within the lattice of the metal. Do not let it become saturated. If the vessel overfills, the unraveled malice will discharge into the wielder's own core—or wake whatever sleeps in the Loom.*
Levan froze.
Slowly, he reached into his forearm wrap and drew out the crimson bodkin he had used against the Shrieker in the Scrap-Tangle.
It was no longer cold iron.
Against his skin, the needle radiated a dull, pulsing warmth, like a tiny heart trapped in steel. A faint, low vibration hummed against his fingertips—the muffled, desperate scream of the beast's neutralized curse, thrashing inside the needle's eye.
Levan closed his hand around the hot metal until his knuckles went white.
"Pack your kit, Beso," Levan whispered, his voice dangerously soft.
"W-what? Why?"
Levan stood, turning toward the open doorway, his gaze locked on the metallic strand gleaming in the dark.
"We're going to go rip their seams apart."